Epitomising the rugged coolness expected of the western and action movie genres, Clint Eastwood stands at the head of an expansive canyon, looking down at his competitors lying strewn across the ground in the valley below. His iconic gaze and almost affectless style made Eastwood one of the go-to stars in the hyper-masculine world of cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, and to this day, he remains one of the most prominent movie icons.
From his work in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to his gritty, grisly performance in Dirty Harry, Eastwood on the screen is something to be eternally admired, and while his achievements as a director are rightfully championed, it’s work as an actor that really made Eastwood the cinema legend that he truly is.
While Eastwood’s early-to-middle career was mainly comprised of action and western movies, eventually, he longed to test himself in different kinds of cinema, having well-established, if not forever, cemented himself as a star of those worlds. In 1978, he made a huge departure from his previous repertoire, although the film in question saw several figures around him actually beg him not to take on.
In Every Which Way but Loose, Eastwood played a trucker and a part-time fighter with a pet orangutan called Clyde. The film did indeed possess some action moments, so Eastwood wasn’t completely lost at sea, but the narrative was one that primarily worked on comedy and a younger audience than Eastwood was used to was the main target.
When Eastwood’s friends and colleagues found out that he was seriously considering the job, they did everything they could to try and dissuade him from accepting it. In an interview with The Guardian, Eastwood once explained that the James Fargo-directed film served as a peculiar decision, noting, “Yeah, I’ve made some strange choices along the way.”
“That was a film my agent and everyone else begged me not to do,” the actor explained. “This is after Dirty Harry, and I’d done a lot of action and adventure films, and they said, ‘That’s not you,’ and I said, ‘Well, what is me? I don’t know.’ To me, it was about reaching out to a younger generation, making a movie that kids could see, with a little less mouth.”
Still, Eastwood couldn’t help but be interested in the role and how it would be so different from his usual characters. He added, “And there was something hip in an odd way about the movie – this strange guy tells his troubles to an orangutan and loses the girl, everything about it was a little bit off-centre. It seemed like something to do at the time.”
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